Monday Apr 04, 2011

At the QCon conference in London I hosted a panel discussion
on The
JCP and the future of Java with Jerome Dochez (GlassFish
Architect from Oracle,) Peter Pilgrim (Java Champion and former JUG leader,)
Stephen Colbourne (Java Champion and JSR 310 Spec Lead,) Ben Evans (author
and JUG leader) and Mark Little (JCP Executive Committee member from RedHat.)
The session was well-attended, and the
discussion was mostly focused on technical matters rather than - as in previous
years - on "what's
wrong with the JCP." I took this as a positive sign.

After the panel I recorded a video interview with Charles
Humble from InfoQ in which we discussed the history of the JCP, where we are
now, and where we're going. You can view it here

From London I flew to Paris Las Vegas for the ServerSide
Symposium. In addition to an Ask the Oracle Executives panel I participated
in another panel discussion with the more provocative title The
Java Community Process: What's
Broken and How to Fix It. My fellow-panelists were James Gosling (who
of course needs no introduction) and Reza Rahman (author and JCP Expert Group
member for Java EE 6 and EJB 3.1.)

The moderator -
Cameron McKenzie, Editor in Chief of the ServerSide.com - asked some tough
questions but ensured that the discussion was fair and balanced. (You can
read summaries here and here.) There
was plenty of audience participation, and two concerns emerged clearly: the
need for greater transparency and
for more participation from the developer community.

Not coincidentally, these are two of the main themes we'll be pursuing as we proceed with our plans to modify the JCP's processes. More on that in the next post.